Dell Hopes New PMPs will Challenge Apple

By Nick Mokey Published August 15, 2008

Dell Hopes New PMPs will Challenge Apple — Image used with permission by copyright holder

After letting word slip last month that it would return to manufacturing MP3 players, Dell has revealed more about its planned line of PMPs in a BusinessWeek article published on Thursday. According to the magazine, Dell will attempt to topple Apple by rallying its biggest competitors to build a more flexible system for music distribution than iTunes.

The company has rested its hopes on Zing, a software company it snapped up in a year ago which is headed by former Apple employee Tim Bucher. In theory, Zing will allow consumers to buy content from a variety of sources and “zing” them from computers to MP3 players and other portable devices, with a focus on compatability.

Recommended Videos

As for when the players – and the new content distribution system – will be debuting, Dell has kept mum. According to anonymous sources cited by BusinessWeek, though, we could be looking at them two different players early next year.

Nick Mokey

Former Editor in Chief

As Digital Trends’ Editor in Chief, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team covering every gadget under the sun, along with…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Amazon is full of copycats and shady brands. This Chrome extension lets you avoid them.

Shopping on Amazon used to be simple. You searched for a product, compared a few familiar brands, and checked out. These days, it often feels like you're scrolling through an endless parade of names that look like someone leaned on a keyboard before hitting publish. That's exactly the problem Knockoff is trying to solve.

Created by developer Josh Pigford, the Chrome extension doesn't promise to expose counterfeit products or magically tell you what's good. Instead, it tackles something arguably more annoying: the flood of unfamiliar, mass-produced brands that dominate Amazon search results.

Emerging Tech

AI agent reportedly carried out an entire ransomware attack on its own

AI didn't just write malware. It apparently clocked in for work.

Cybersecurity researchers say they have documented what could be the first ransomware attack carried out almost entirely by an autonomous AI agent, marking a significant shift in how cyberattacks could be conducted in the future. According to cloud security firm Sysdig, they have uncovered a ransomware operation dubbed JadePuffer that appears to have relied on a large language model (LLM) agent to perform nearly every stage of the attack without continuous human intervention.

If confirmed, the incident suggests AI is moving beyond writing malicious code and into actively planning, adapting, and executing cyberattacks in real time.

Emerging Tech

The Washington Post predicted how tech will advance 50 years ago and the success rate is humbling

The Washington Post predicted 2026 tech in 1976. It got a lot right.

Fifty years ago, when floppy disks were cutting-edge and the personal computer revolution had barely begun, The Washington Post attempted a remarkably ambitious exercise: predict what life in 2026 would look like. Some of those predictions now read like science fiction. Others feel surprisingly ordinary because they have become part of everyday life.

In a retrospective published for America's 250th anniversary, the newspaper revisited science editor Thomas O'Toole's 1976 article Inventing the Future, comparing its forecasts with today's technological reality. The results reveal that while predicting exact timelines is nearly impossible, identifying long-term scientific trends can be remarkably accurate.